Ottoman History Podcast

E334 | Along with new maritime networks, information stiched together the empires of the early modern period. One component of the growing networks of information in the increasingly connected space of the Mediterranean world was espionage. As we learn in our latest conversation with Emrah Safa Gürkan about his new book Sultanın Casusları (Spies of the Sultan), the Ottoman Empire was both party an...

E333 | Pirates are usually imagined as outlaws. But as the history of the early modern Mediterranean demonstrates, the line between illegal raiding and legitimate maritime violence was blurry, easily crossed, and often a moving target. In this episode, we talk to Joshua White about his book Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean. We consider how piracy shaped legal institutions and thought in...

E332 | Migration has long been a driving force in the history of global and transnational connections. In this episode, we explore the politics of diaspora surrounding different migrant communities in the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond with three student guests. First, we discuss the little-known history of Vietnamese migrants in the state of Israel. Then, through film, we revisit the histo...

Bibliography and full episode at http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2017/09/diaspora.html

E331 | Though it is often ignored among the many histories of the great migrations of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire experienced the arrival of millions of migrants over the course of its last decades. The migrant or muhacir was therefore not just a critical demographic component of both Ottoman cities and the countryside but also part of and subject to different political projects associate...

E330 | When did Muslims first come to the South Asian subcontinent? The answer to this question has formed a crucial part of nationalism in both India and Pakistan, where the story begins with the conquest of Sind by Muhammad ibn Qasim in 712 AD. In this episode, we speak with Manan Ahmed Asif about his book, A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia, which reexamines a ke...

E329 | In this interview, we explore the early history of Islam in West Africa with Professor Ousmane Kane, who has mapped out the networks of Islamic learning in the region. We discuss intellectual history, the curricula of madrasas and a day in the life of a 16th-century student in Sankore. We then turn to the role of language in West African Muslim intellectual production, and the effects of co...

E328 | The seventeenth century, contrary to popular belief, was a time of great originality and change for scholars in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb. In this interview, Khaled El-Rouayheb debunks the many myths of intellectual decline by showing how the intellectual production changed in tandem with major migrations across the Islamic world. We start with the influx of Kurdish and Azeri logic...

E327 | Visual sources such as photographs, maps, and miniatures often serve as accompaniment or adornment within works of Ottoman history. In this episode, we feature new work that interrogates methods of analyzing and employing visual sources for Ottoman history that go beyond the practice of "image as decoration." Following a conversation with the organizers of the "Visual Sources in Late Ottoma...

E326 | Commodities, their circulation, and their consumption have long been favorite topics of cultural and economic historians alike. In this episode, we build on the historiography of commodities by studying further the social and political context of two particular commodities: coffee and marijuana. Our guests, Casey Lurtz and Lina Britto, have each studied these commodities in their Latin Amer...

E325 | A perennial question in Ottoman history is why printing was not fully adopted in the Middle East for the production of books until the late nineteenth century. Armenians, however, did start to print their books as early as the sixteenth century. In this episode, Sebouh Aslanian explains this rather sudden shift by telling the story of how the twin traumas of the Celali Rebellions and Shah A...

E324 | Genetics have emerged as a new scientific tool for studying human ancestry and historical migration. And as research into the history of genetics demonstrates, genetics and other bioscientific approaches to studying ancestry were also integral to the transformation of the very national and racial categories through which ancestry has come to be described over the course of the 19th and 20th...

E323 | In this collaboration with The Southeast Passage, we discuss the emergence of the Turkish nationalist movement under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the establishment of a sovereign Republic of Turkey in 1923. As our guest Prof. Erik-Jan Zürcher notes, Kemalism can be studied both as a political transformation from armed struggle to a one-party state administration system and as...

E322 | This episode examines historical approaches to Armenians, Kurds, and Turks in the eastern provinces of Ottoman Anatolia. "Shared history" has been offered up as a corrective to the existing historiography's nationalist and often exclusionary approaches, but what does writing a "shared history" actually look like? Yaşar Tolga Cora and Dzovinar Derderian talk about their approaches in their r...

E321 | What is the aural possibility of Islamic life in the European cities today? This special episode begins with a ten-minute segment from an audio composition crafted by our guest, musicologist Peter McMurray, from recent field recordings and ethnographies he conducted among various Turkish communities in Berlin. As the discussion progresses we weave in and out of two discussions. First, we lo...

E320 | The distance between the shores of the Ottoman Empire and New York City may be great, but, as this episode suggests, a great many connections exist between these places, too. This episode explores both the everyday lives of those hailing from the Ottoman domains over several centuries in the Big Apple, as well as the perceptions New Yorkers and Americans more generally had of the Ottoman Em...

E319 | The rise of Islamic modernist movements from the 19th century onward brought two potentially contradictory processes. On the one hand, Muslim thinkers began to imagine an increasingly global Muslim community unified by identity that might transcend many of the communal and political divisions of the day. On the other hand, in seeking to delineate the parameters of modern Islam, such thinker...

E318 | Long before European contact with the Americas forged transoceanic networks and connections in the Atlantic and Pacific, the Indian Ocean served as a maritime space that connected the many states, economies, and communities of its vast basin stretching from East Africa to Southeast Asia. In this multi-part episode, we follow this maritime space into the modern period, exploring the enduranc...

E317 | The history of late Ottoman Palestine and the changes in settlement, agriculture, economy and politics that occurred there remain a subject of great interest for historians of the Middle East. In this episode, our guest Tamar Novick introduces a new approach to that history using the lens of ecology. We explore changes in late Ottoman Palestine through environment and human-animal relations...

E316 | Among the many important medieval texts written in Arabic, few have received more attention from scholars in Europe than The Muqaddimah, an introduction to history by the 14th-century North African writer Ibn Khaldun. In this episode, we explore another of arena for reception of Ibn Khaldun, the Ottoman Empire, with our guest Kenan Tekin. In particular, we examine Ottoman translations of Ib...

E315 | Orientalist representations loom large in the history of 19th-century colonialism and European engagement with the late Ottoman Empire. But how did the orientalist discourses of the late Ottoman period compare with European representations of the Ottoman Empire during its early rise? In this episode, Pascale Barthe revisits this question through the lens of 16th century French encounters wi...

E314 | Salonica was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world until its liquidation by the Nazis in 1943. Historians often mark the beginning of the end of the Jewish community in 1913 when the city was annexed by Greece. Devin Naar challenges this presumption in this podcast by looking at how the Jewish community continued to flourish and adapt as part of...

Michael Talbot offers a short history of a late Ottoman goodwill mission to Japan followed by commentary by Cemil Aydin Recorded by Michael Talbot in Yokohama, Japan

E313 | In political discourses today, the “Muslim world” is evoked in a variety of contexts, ranging from pan-Islamic visions of political unity to a set of racist generalizations that present roughly a fifth of the world’s population as a monolithic whole. But as our guest in this episode, Cemil Aydın explains in his new book The Idea of the Muslim World, the very notion of a Muslim world is rece...

E312 | More and more, podcasts are appearing on university syllabi. But is it possible to conduct an entire university course that revolves entirely around the podcast medium? In this special episode, we sit down with Dana Sajdi and a class of over 20 students at Boston College who are enrolled in an experimental course entitled "Podcasting the Ottomans." In our conversation, we take a look inside...